By Nicholas Davies

I’m going to say something I don’t seem to get the opportunity to say nearly often enough these days: I like this movie.

‘Dead Man Down’ does what a good thriller should: it hits all its marks. And here’s a tell: it’s pretty much impossible to tell you anything substantial about the narrative without giving away far too much. I’m not one for spoilers, so I won’t go into detail about the story. Let’s just say that Victor (Colin Farrell) is playing a very complicated gangland game that becomes all the more complex when it unpredictably involves Beatrice, the woman who lives opposite him (Noomi Rapace), and his good friend and partner in crime, D’arcy (Dominic Cooper). I HIGHLY recommend that you don’t read anything about the film before you see it – uncovering its layers is probably most of the fun of watching it.

Things play out exactly as they should, with plot twists, explosions, gun fights, double-talk and high-risk deception all pushing the story forward and keeping the audience in its ever-tightening grip. The film rests on solid performances: Farrell plays in all corners, doing harsh, hurt and heroic in equal measures; Rapace throws out a particularly excellent moment of seething anger when the story suddenly takes a hairpin turn. As the druglord Alphonse, Terrence Howard maintains a difficult balance, moving from threatening to hysterical as needed. And a real treat is the always-wonderful Isabelle Huppert playing Beatrice’s perpetually cheeful, hard-of-hearing mother.

The tightness of the film is perhaps not a surprise, as it is directed by Niels Arden Oplev, best-known for his massive success with the original, Swedish version of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ (2009). It’s obvious, too, that Oplev knows cinema – here and there, his film pays gentle homage to some of the great thrillers of film history. Check out the eveningtime lighting and atmosphere, for example, when Victor and Beatrice catch sight of each through the windows of their apartments – straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ (1954). And that lingering overhead shot near the film’s end, after the final sequence of gunfire carnage … puts you in mind of Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976), no?

Referencing other directors’ masterworks can be a dangerous move, since it can’t help but invite comparison. Is this film as good as a Hitchcock, a Scorsese? Well, no – for that, it would have to take the neo-noir thriller somewhere new, give it a real twist. (If you’re looking for that, see Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Drive’ (2011). The parallels in the films’ essential qualities are striking – especially the romantic relationships – but Refn’s film is, finally, superior due to its greater moral complexity. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan put in some of the finest performances of the decade.) Still, it’s not faint praise to say ‘Dead Man Down’ is a success because of well-handled direction, uniformly good performances, a convincing story and great cinematography. A definite to-see.

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